C'est Moi

just a few seconds ago, i typed these words to my best friend on Yahoo Messenger: today i cried. buckets. he replied empathetically. oh my.

that's all i needed to read to know he had penetrated my abyss and embraced it whole. if you should feel like reaching out across time and space and whisper away this hurt, please do. i know (in the logical centre of my brain) that yes, this, too, will pass. for now, it's just sitting there, stolid, silent. in the middle of the brown, varnished wooden floor. the afternoon sun is behind it, casting its face in demi-shadow.

follow me here, my friends, where i need you.

... saka na ang summer and fall. 6 months left in belgium and the seasons are slipping away from me. i thought my last winter was all of one week long and that spring had asserted itself too early. until today.

sing along with me, my dears, with (just!) two of my favourite astrud songs. i would have loved to put in "far away", her duet with chet baker, but alas, it is not a very popular song. pity. if i knew how to make these video clips, i might have put it up on you tube already! :)

it's great singing "dindi". soothing, sensual, simple. like astrud. like me.

he passed away in 2005, two years after suffering a major stroke, and the music world has felt his loss keenly. that is, if you count yourself among the lovers of the kind of music luther van dross created with his smooth, silky voice, and the way he sang so easily and casually he could easily put wannabe divas to shame. you hear that, sarah geronimo and your ilk? get some danged good voice lessons pronto and stop harassing our ears!

take a breath, people, and give me 7 minutes of your time. you'll not regret it.

in his "bad" album,one of his hit songs has the title... "i just can't stop loving you". this is exactly how i feel about him, his music, his awesome prodigious talent. in this entry, watch the video clip closely. the best part is in the middle, somewhere around the 5th minute, showing him and his sister at the 1993 grammy awards. what janet said, what he said, their beautiful sibling hug, in the excerpt shown, rocked me to the very core.

he's 2 yrs and nearly 3 months. babbling, speaking, expressing himself. to the untrained ear, it sounds like gibberish. to this mama of another son who was speaking clearly by 8 months, my younger son is a lesson in how a child living in a trilingual environment tries to grasp the rudiments of english, tagalog, and dutch in order to get his message across. it's a linguist's dream!

my older son, turning 6 this april, is grappling with the multiple layers of semantics, and his child-like incisiveness never fails to amaze me.